The Calm
by RKP-Yoshi
Summary: If the androids could breathe, surely they'd die here...


Being down here, where the androids were kept, melting metals and alloy skeletons—all gloomy grey with sparks of firelight here and there—is like being in a sweatshop. Dusty floors and no ventilation whatsoever.

Yuma wears a face mask. It covers his mouth, his left eye, the whole side of his face where the accident had happened—all grueling and raw flesh, scars like welts across a face he'd once loved. But he pretends it's for the sake of his lungs.

With an air tank hoisted over his shoulder like a hydration pack, he shoulders past androids with missing limbs, bulging eyes hardly in their sockets. Androids with open circuits on the tips of their spines; the desecrated and leftover. A few nod to him, one smiles. Yuma keeps his eyes on the floor and leaves the workshop. He hadn't found much scrap metal today.

Back upstairs, where the sun shines a molten orange, hazy and ugly through the dark glass of the building's windows, he can just make out the passing train overhead. It clatters soundless and far away, but the rumble is undeniable, it shakes the earth beneath his feet and brings with it: a thrum in his soles, the promise to Gumi that he will be home soon.

He has to get moving, he realizes as he pulls his greasy hair into a ponytail. It'll be another twenty minutes before he reaches their side of the city, and as he embarks on this daily travel he spots the first thunder cloud, blooming black in the east. Already the wind blows musty and metallic, the smell of copper wire and rusted pennies rises from the dirt.

It started, of course, when the fire rained from the north and the city was engulfed in a turbine womb of acidic rains and black murkiness. Yuma hadn't been there for it, but Gumi had. He had grown up on the stories of the android wars and the polluted streams, how the beasts of the deep ocean had washed up dead, frothing with mercury. The crops had attracted blight and the storms came tremulous, balking winds shattering glass from every pane—buildings collapsed as heavy as fallen gods before every foot. Gumi was there for all of it.

And now, the sky was never blue (Gumi had told Yuma it once was), but a charcoal grey from dawn to dusk with, sun so blazing bright it seemed to loom just over the Earth's cusp, where the moon was once large but now dwindled and swayed the tides. The oceans were no more, but the streams were still there, collecting brownish rains no longer tainted, though still ugly like the craters of the Earth so like the ones once seen on the moon's surface. But the city was intact, at least a little bit; a piece of mechatronic heaven that clanked under boots and smelled sour and even more so like rust in the winters.

If the androids could breathe, surely they'd die here.

It had been the androids, really. The start of the wars and panic; how was mankind to react to something so frightening? When the space race began millenniums ago, it had been met with panicked lies. False footage spread like cancer in a world still stable beneath human feet; and when the nuclear plants began to fail and the missiles were launched into space, the first human missions to mars where colonies of humans failed to live, all burned out to dried bone months after arrival. It all brought with it a human desire to thrive, to continue living on the planet already claimed.

And so the android was made, people with people-like eyes and circuit boards inside their heads. They were bulky and large and too heavy to drive, but they evolved—and suddenly, there was no telling between the man and the robot; and as mars began to wither and the oils of titan were saturated and collected, only to find that they were poisonous with noxious gas that leaked from the returning ships and ended up killing more humans than any natural disaster ever could, the androids rose and they learned. They began the first war that set the skyline on fire.

Yuma sprints most of the way home, through hover lanes of HOV cars with their blue flames and invisible steam, the scraps from the workshop clattering loudly in his side bag. The bulk is weighty, but he feels nothing as it slaps against his thigh; when one's bones have been replaced with carbon fiber, nerves tend to be non-existent at some point.

Yuma leaves his air tank on the kitchen table beside the monochrome salt and pepper shakers and the electric navy colored napkins Gumi loves so much and leaves through the back door to the dusty metal grey of their backyard. Gumi sits in a wicker chair. Her hair is still in the bun it was in a few weeks ago, jade fringe braided into the rest of her hair. Her complexion is clear still but marred by dried dirt off Yuma's fingers the morning before he set out.

Her left palm up rests on her thigh. It's no longer a shock to see the missing fingers there and, the wedding band on the wrong hand, the wrong knuckle, for the one it had once been on was now gone. Yuma still cradles Gumi's hand between his own, bringing the sharp bone of her knuckles to his forehead; such a thing doesn't stop him. The comfort in this contact is more than any other human could ever give Yuma.

'I found a few things, but... not a lot,' Yuma tells her.

Gumi blinks and touches the mask with her good hand, unclasping the latch beside Yuma's right ear. No, he tries to say with his visible eye, topaz iris glistening, but Gumi has pulled the mask away.

The air tastes odd, like tarnished nickel, like the rising storm leering hot over the top of them. He can smell the sour earth congealing like clotted blood, rising in warm fumes. But then Gumi is touching his scars. The skin is still tender—has always been and will probably always be, but her fingers are cold and the pressure is gentle. She caresses Yuma's cheek, the tips of her fingers shaking slightly.

'Should we go downstairs?' Yuma mutters, his eyes slipping shut at the contact. Its a silent agreement of sorts.

Once down there, where the world can't be smelled and all the passing sounds have been muted to a far off tremble just beyond their reach, Gumi sits on her old work bench (now Yuma's), her hand resting on the raised medical plate that hovers at a comfortable chest height. Gumi closes her eyes, wary and fatigued as Yuma takes out the scrap metal he had been able to scavenge. It isn't much, but it's enough for a proper index finger and a ring finger.

There's no pain, for the nerves there have been shot, but still Taekwoon nuzzles his nose to Gumi's cold cheek in an attempt to comfort her. He still remembers the fluttering feeling in his stomach like a buzzing live wire: he'd been terrified as it grew more so with every second that time when Gumi had rebuilt his femur for him.

It's a human response Yuma can still identify well: it was fear. Fear that bodes and grows and becomes something wild, deep in the pit of one's bowels. The idea of being cut open, parts of one's being replaced with another's—parts from androids, nonetheless— it was more frightening than when the hellish blue of Uranus's rising light fell into Saturn's orbit.

"You alright?" Yuma whispers. Gumi's mouth twitches and she nods. He's just about done, Yuma mentally promises as he melds the fiber to the remaining bone in Gumi's knuckles. Bursts of blood bright as fresh oil pour steadily from Gumi's open finger, but soon the bleeding stops and the newly made skeleton is covered with silicone, so perfectly matching the color of Gumi's skin it's hard to believe it isn't quite real.

Yuma hums softly, a smile forming at the corners of his eyes. He lifts Gumi's hand, her fingers splayed out across his palm.

Gumi's eyes glimmer faintly. She brings her hands together, fingers wrapping tightly around each other. She isn't supposed to speak, but she does anyway, uttering a quiet, but genuine thank you against Yuma's cheek.

'Later,' Yuma begins, 'I'll fix the others. Your little finger and,' he kisses Gumi's new knuckles, the texture of her synthetic skin strange but not unknown, "your middle finger."

Gumi smiles. With her new digits, she brushes aside Yuma's sooty pink locks and cups his face, the scars raised and red (but not unsightly to her) just beneath the pads of her fingers. "Honestly it's okay. You don't need to go back." Her voice is warm, tinted with concern.

Yuma shrugs, despite the calm that rushes into him. He won't ever admit the uncertainty that comes over him each visit to the city, and the fear that breeds just below his skin when the androids turn to him, watch him come and go with mouths moving over words never spoken, for their audio boxes have all been broken.

'I'll go,' he says instead, his mouth pressing whispering kisses to the curve of Gumi's jaw. 'But maybe not tomorrow.'

When Gumi's arms wrap around him a second later, her palms flat against Yuma's spine, he can feel all eight points of Gumi's fingers through his shirt. He smiles against this pressure; his scars forgotten, the world forgotten. Rain pelts distant and turbulent against the upstairs windows, but Yuma doesn't acknowledge anything but the way Gumi smiles against his mouth.


End file.
